ARTS & VISUAL ARTS: A total eclipse from the start

The moon passes between the sun and the earth on 11 August. Does that make it worthy of an exhibition? By Tom Lubbock

There's a 43 per cent chance, the met men say, that the sun will shine over Cornwall on the morning of Wednesday 11 August. If it doesn't shine, the world will still go dark for two minutes just after 11 o'clock. But grey skies will obviously take the edge off the total eclipse.

The sun wasn't shining much last Friday as a minibus carried a small consignment of press around some of the exhibits which make up As Dark As Light. This is an arts spread, largely visual arts, organised by St Ives International in response to the forthcoming eclipse.

It's taking place at the Tate Gallery in St Ives, at the Newlyn Gallery in Penzance, and at various other ad hoc sites around the Cornish tip. It's a rolling, non-simultaneous thing that is going on till the end of the year, and some of the work isn't on yet. I guess it sounds a nice idea. It will have a large potential audience in the area next month. But. Well, I don't think it was just the weather.

No, even on the finest day, I think that what we saw last Friday would seem a pretty rum bunch of work. Of the eight eclipse-commissions visible, only one made the trip really worthwhile. I don't think this was bad luck either. These recruited "responses" are an inherently dodgy way of generating art.

It's possible, of course, that you'll find some artist who's truly interested in responding to the great darkness. And it's possible that good work will then result. Possible, possible. But the probabilities here are far less favourable than those for a sunny eclipse.

And before getting down to the particular works in As Dark As Light, it's worth dwelling on this response-recruitment thing, because this occasion is far from being unique. In fact, it's very normal. It's how a large amount of contemporary art gets produced. You might call it the "mum, what shall I draw?" syndrome. But it's not as though artists themselves are asking this question; they're usually quite capable of thinking up work all on their own. Rather, they're having this question imposed on them, as a condition of getting funded and exhibited. The basic economics of contemporary art are involved here.

If you're a painter, you can often sell your work. There always seem to be walls available. But if you're a non-painting artist doing anything that takes up a bit of room, sales are less easy and the work is often expensive to make. You need subsidy, which you get via some arts body. And one way that arts bodies like to filter their funds is by thinking up more or less daft and unnecessary commissions for artists to do - "responses" to some event or location or theme. And artists are only eligible for the funds if they're able to feign an interest in making such a response.

Now the peculiarly mad thing about this situation is that it's not only the artists who generally aren't interested in these commissions. The people who cook them up, the curators and administrators, aren't really interested in them either. Don't be thinking fondly back to the Popes, the Gonzaga court, or some other great patron of yore. The thing about these commissions is that they have no public or private necessity. They're simply a way of filtering money to artists.

They do occasionally have good results. But usually the best that can happen is a commission that's so vague and meaningless as to be, in effect, carte blanche. Failing that, you have a system which ensures that good artists get distracted - while at the same time a whole lot of mediocre artists, who can become very skilled at devising plausible "response" proposals, get favoured.

You notice, I'm assuming, that the best work nowadays will be produced in carte blanche conditions. I do assume this; or rather, I deduce it. Of course, you may think this is an unfortunate state of culture: artists shouldn't be free-floating creatives, they should be more connected. No doubt this sort of thinking is what's behind the present business. But if so, it's only the most notional sort of connectedness that's achieved. And bad art doesn't connect to anything.

Back to Cornwall. The first work we saw, at Newlyn Gallery, was a funny lesson in how half-cocked this commissioning thing can be. I recognised it at once, because I'd seen it only last year, or a slightly larger version of it, when it was part of an enormous and disastrous response-recruitment drive across the north of England, called "artranspennine" (sic). On that occasion, it was responding to the Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture in Leeds. And now, here it was in Penzance, responding to a total eclipse of the sun.

This versatile piece is by the duo Langlands and Bell. It's a kind of sculpture-bench in clean wood and steel, oval-shaped but with an opening, and assemblable in alternative ways: as rows (for an audience) or as a ring (for discussions). It looked fine in the Henry Moore Centre; in fact, there it seemed a rare example of response-commissioning that had come good. But the only reason it comes to be in As Dark as Light is that its title is Eclipse - which, as far as I can see, is a typographic pun (an ellipse, with a gap, thus C-shaped), and nothing to do with the sun.

With the works at the St Ives Tate, meanwhile, a policy of no names, no packdrill, seems kindest. Their relevance to the eclipse is usually more obvious, and that's doubtless the source of the trouble. They could hardly have been chosen on their own merits. What most of them are doing in a leading public gallery is a deep mystery. But I liked Tamsin Pender's piece on the roof terrace - threads of tackle stretched tight in colour- chords right across the view, dead parallel to and playing far-near games with the sea-horizon (and again, significantly, not much to do with eclipses).

There's only one obvious and perfect candidate for this particular commission, and luckily they have him: the US light-artist James Turrell. He has two works, one indoors and one out. Arcus, upstairs at Newlyn, presents a mysteriously luminous rectangle on the wall of a darkened room, so faint that it only becomes visible after several minutes of eye-accustoming, and then appears as a glowing, depthless void. This is nice, but as indoor Turrells go - I've seen ones so space-disorienting that you almost fall over - quite mild.

The outdoor sky-dome is a beauty. The Elliptic Ecliptic (the word play is irresistible, apparently) is sited in a steep field at Treemenheere, outside Ludgvan, and takes quite a bit of finding and walking. What looks like a vast oval dustbin rises vertically from the ground. Pass through the door, and you're in a white oval room with slope-backed seating round the edge, a clean oval hole cut in the high roof, and through that a view of the open sky: Saturday morning now, and still rather grey, though busy.

But the sky isn't a view. So framed, deprived of all other perceptual context, it becomes more like a cut out disk, or a projected vision, brought closer, pictorialised, almost flattened down on to the roof - the flattening effect is especially strong at dusk - even as you know the gulfs of space involved, and almost a lit rather than a luminous surface. So you look up, and it could take all day. And though I suppose that even if the weather is terrible, no art will be able to compete with the natural blackout, still, this response to the heavens isn't to be missed either.

As Dark As Light: Tate Gallery, St Ives; Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance; and sites around west Cornwall. To the end of the year (01736 333024)